I would like to pick your brain and offer a hopefully useful service at the same time.

On http://readbeam.com/ I have cobbled together basically a hosted version of calibre. This allows you to either request news sources manually or have them sent to you on a schedule e.g: Get me the New York Times every morning at 6 and mail it automagically to my Kindle - like having your dog fetch the paper automatically.

The site is currently neither beautiful nor comfortable. Please give it a spin and let me know what you think. Please be gentle when requesting many sources on a frequent schedule, this is quite computing intensive and may bog down or crash the system. If the site is down please check back a few hours later. I have upgraded the instance but I know the HackerNews effect can be brutal sometimes.

I chose to compile all the recipes on github.com (https://github.com/readbeam/recipes), for all git users out there, this may be helpful.

I am especially interested on your views about all the copyright or other legal issues I may face here. My current understanding is - basically - that the manual fetch should be ok, because one person is manually requesting a copy of a site - like when you request a site with your browser and maybe have an adblocker installed.

I hope the subscription service is legal as well, because not I am serving the recipes, but the user is. So my line of thought is: I am just offering a hosting platform with an API, you are programming it and doing something 'bad' (accessing e.g. the economist.com site, that is). So it's again you doing the scraping...

But I don't know if this holds water, please let me know what you think.

Thanks for your time,

Tom

P.S. For now it's mobi only, if there is enough demand, I will add epub support later.